The demographic characteristics of homicide victims and offenders were different from the characteristics of the general population.

This means that some race, sex and age groups are disproportionately represented in murder statistics.

Based on available data from 1980 to 2008—
Blacks were disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and offenders. The victimization rate for blacks (27.8 per 100,000) was 6 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000). The offending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost 8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000).

Males represented 77% of homicide victims and nearly 90% of offenders. The victimization rate for males (11.6 per 100,000) was 3 times higher than the rate for females (3.4 per 100,000). The offending rate for males (15.1 per 100,000) was almost 9 times higher than the rate for females (1.7 per 100,000).

Approximately a third (34%) of murder victims and almost half (49%) of the offenders were under age 25. For both victims and offenders, the rate per 100,000 peaked in the 18 to 24 year-old age group at 17.1 victims per 100,000 and 29.3 offenders per 100,000.

So, basically blacks are much more likely to commit murder than whites, in the same way that men and youngsters perpetrate more homicides than women and people over 25. The difference is that, although it is well known and accepted that males and young people offend more, we don't read or hear in the mainstream media that blacks offend more, even if the public is not stupid and suspects it.

While whites are 82.9% of the American population, they only execute 45.3% of all murders. Conversely, blacks, who are just 12.6% of the population, carry out an astonishing 52.5% of all homicides.

The different rates of victimization (6 times higher for blacks) and offending (8 times higher for blacks) for murder quoted above also belie the "black-on-black" crime narrative which the media love and use to try to shelter blacks from the accusations of racism and hate crimes that would arise spontaneously by looking at the statistics. Blacks commit more attacks on whites than on other blacks. From the New Century Foundation's report The Color of Crime:

Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against blacks. Forty-five percent of their victims are white, 43 percent are black, and 10 percent are Hispanic. When whites commit violent crime, only three percent of their victims are black.

Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.

Blacks are 2.25 times more likely to commit officially-designated hate crimes against whites than vice versa.

Oh, look who is racist now!

The blog of my friend, author Alexander Boot, has some more statistics:

What about interracial crimes then? There’s no shortage of those, according to the FBI study for 2007, cited in Pat Buchanan’s book Suicide of a Superpower... Blacks also perpetrated 14,000 assaults on white women – with exactly zero committed by white men on black women.

If interracial crime is the ugliest manifestation of racism, what does this tell us about where racism really resides — in America?

A reference to the pamphlet Black Skin Privilege, by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, can provide us with the appropriate conclusion by means of the following considerations:

Black sin privilege has created an optical illusion in the liberal culture that white on black attack are commonplace events when in fact there are five times as many black attacks on whites as the reverse. As Horowitz and Perazzo note, in 2010, blacks committed more than 25 times the number of acts of interracial violence than whites did.

Saturday, 24 August 2013

This is another article transferred from my older blog which I'm closing down, still relevant today.

A 7 August 2006 survey reveals that almost a quarter of British Muslims believe the July 7 terror attacks in London, the worst the city has ever seen in its long history, were justified because of Britain's support for the war on terror.

And nearly half of the UK Muslims questioned said that the 9/11 attacks on New York were a conspiracy between the US and Israel.

The survey found Muslims under the age of 24 were twice as likely to justify the 7/7 attacks as those aged over 45.

A third of those polled said that they would prefer to live under Sharia law in the UK rather than British law.

Now the question is: what is the news value of these results?

Only if you are a liberal, a leftie or a person brainwashed by politically correct propaganda, this may seem shocking to you.

Let’s face it: the Muslims living or trying to live in the West are extremely lucky that the Western people do not know almost anything about Islam.
Ignorance is the greatest ally of the Islamic world or, to paraphrase a famous song, Western ignorance is a Muslim’s best friend.

The majority of people of Western countries, understandably, do not want to read the Koran and do not want to know about the Muslim doctrine. Who can blame them? It’s one of the most uninteresting theories ever developed, philosophically it’s a non-entity.

Unfortunately, its importance does not derive from its non-existent intellectual worth: it stems from the terrible power it holds on people who culturally and morally belong to a different age from ours, from its political significance.

Who else in the West should know anything about Islam? The media people, like all those on the left of the political spectrum, are completely naïve in their misunderstanding of the Muslim world. They erroneously believe that everybody is the same, that all humans of all races, cultures and latitudes want the same things and share the same values, which is obvioulsy not true. So they attribute to Muslims the same desires, intentions and attitudes of mind that they have, so losing any possibility of grasping the first thing about them.

One detail particularly revealing of this huge incomprehension, a funny one too, occurred when Channel 4’s Jon Snow, during the TV broadcast yesterday of his survey of UK Muslims, talked in sheer puzzlement to the camera about a Muslim bloke who had just tried to convert him to his own religion: “He tried to convert to Islam even me!” he cried, in true disbelief, as if the young chap had attempted something amazing and not simply done what was the most natural thing to him, what the Koran demands him to do with any means.

For the Koran, the whole world must become Muslim one day.

The advertisng blurb for this recent survey was “You’d better know him better” next to the picture of a Muslim lad.

But the point is: we know who Muslims are already, or at least the Western authors, political thinkers and philosophers who have not been blinded by the current media propaganda and political orthodoxy know.

Whenever some Muslim commits an atrocity, you watch the news coverage and what do you get? TV crews interviewing Muslim leaders, “scholars” and common people about whether that is the “real Islam” or “what the Koran says” or not.

But you never see or read anything in the mainstream media that shows the other side of the coin, a different opinion.

This biased, one-sided reporting is the equivalent of a situation in which some staff of a large corporation, like a multi-national for example, committed something illegal or damaging to the public health or the environment, and the only people that journalists bothered to interview, the only ones asked to voice their opinion on the matter, were the spokespersons of the company involved itself.

Friday, 23 August 2013

The fact that communism, or even socialism, cannot be implemented in reality, is by now widely accepted; even Leftists and liberals, if unhappily and grudgingly, had to surrender to the overwhelming historical evidence which has accumulated especially in the last 2 or 3 decades, showing that a socialist economy is almost a contradiction in terms, and a society based on those principles is barely feasible, and certainly not a happy one.

But hardly anyone seems to question the ethical validity of socialist ideas. In the mind of most people, they still inhabit the moral high ground.

In fact, I believe that socialism not only starts from premises which are wrong factually, but it is also wrong ethically.

First of all, let's start from explaining what wealth is. There is a common misconception that wealth is a theft of sort, that people become rich by taking from others.

I don't think that this idea began with socialism. The French libertarian socialist, or anarchist, Proudhon, famously said: "Property is theft", but I don't think that he was original in that.

No, it seems to me that, when you lack something, to blame someone else for your want is one of the simplest, most instinctive of all human impulses: envy.

The thought behind this seems to be that there's only a given, limited amount of goods, and if somebody has more, then it follows that somebody else must necessarily have less.

There's a long history of that idea, perhaps beginning with humanity itself, through Robin Hood to modern-day socialists.

It is a misconception, due to a failure to understand the nature of wealth. Wealth is essentially created, not given.

If anybody is in any doubt about it, they just have to think of these two countries: Iran and Switzerland.

The Swiss live in an extremely hard habitat, a region of high mountains very unsuitable, on the face of it, to human settlement and economic prosperity. Still, the Swiss have the 9th highest Gross Domestic Product based on Purchasing-Power-Parity (PPP) per capita in the world.

It is obviously the use that both these populations have made of their natural resources that has made them rich or poor, not those resources in themselves. And that use stems from a conscious choice of those people, which in turn comes from their mindset, their way of thinking.

And here we arrive at one of the many hypotheses and fundamental parts of his theory that Karl Marx got wrong: the idea that human beings are dominated by the ineluctable laws of economics, which in turn are governed by the dialectic of history and eventually of nature.

For both Marx and Sigmund Freud humans are not free agents, but subject to deterministic principles. They go against the Christian concept of free will, which is not only closer to the truth, but also positively guides human behaviour, so it is pragmatically useful.

Instead, psychoanalysis and Marxism, two theories of huge influence, one in the personal the other in the public sphere but both profoundly affecting the cultural and political life of our time, have done a lot of damage through the creation of a highly destructive way of thinking that denies free will.

It's true that most individual human beings only use a little part of their potential. That doesn't imply the flattering idea, which has sometimes been expressed, that everybody is potentially an Einstein or a hidden genius.

It just means that most human beings don't fully realize how much control they can have on their lives, how much difference a choice rather than another can make on one's destiny.

Thursday, 22 August 2013

This article in FrontPage Magazine, headlined "Oprah: Just Because You’re Not Racist Doesn’t Mean You’re Not a Racist" , reminds me of what happened in Britain when the Macpherson's Inquiry into the death of black teenager Stephen Lawrence on 22 April 1993 enshrined that racism does not need to exist in reality for someone to be guilty of it, opening the door to the abuses we witness today, with these words: "A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person".

So what if racism in America is at an all-time low? So what if the vast majority of Americans are not only not racist, but actively anti-racist? That’s not enough for Oprah. “A lot of people think if they think they’re not using the n-word themselves, they physically aren’t using the n-word themselves, and do not harbor ill will towards black people that it’s not racist,” she said in a comment that is as challenged syntactically as it is intellectually.

This is paranoia of the highest sort. And it is absolutely crippling to America’s future. If a huge number of Americans believe that racism that is not present in action nonetheless lurks beneath the surface of our life, waiting to burst forth in a conflagration of hate such as that which allegedly claimed Trayvon, there can be no shared future.

But many on the left, including Oprah, apparently don’t want a shared future. They want emotional blackmail. The corollary to the belief that racism hides in the nooks and crannies of the white personality is the belief that the only way to expunge such racism by embracing the philosophy of people like Oprah. If you see The Butler, you’re buying a racial indulgence; if you vote Obama, you’re buying a racial indulgence...

That seems to be the perspective not just of many black Americans like Oprah and Daniels, but the perspective of many in various minority communities. For example, in California, Governor Jerry Brown recently signed a law declaring that transgender children must be allowed to enter bathrooms of their choice and join sports teams of their choice. The idea here is that this will minimize bullying, as though most Americans bear children with gender identity issues some sort of ill will. The truth is far simpler: Americans have a right to worry that their children will feel uncomfortable in a bathroom next to someone of the opposite sex, no matter what that person believes him or herself to be. That’s not wrong. That’s normal. But the onus has now been placed on children without gender identity issues to explain why they feel uncomfortable at the urinal next to a girl, even if they’ve never bullied a transgender child.

That’s nasty. More than that, it’s an attempt to shape values by implying that everyone is in need of having their fundamental racism, sexism, homophobia overcome by government action. Americans have nothing left to discuss. America is now a country where whites are often perceived as racist until proven innocent. And the only way to prove yourself innocent is to perform acts approved by the leftist establishment.

None of this helps black Americans. All it does is perpetuate power for those who divide us in pursuit of political gain. Hillary Clinton, who has begun touring the country invoking the supposed racism of voter ID supporters, is merely the latest race hustler to attempt this pernicious trick. Unfortunately, it seems to work. And that means that Oprah’s racial narrative is far more influential than The Butler’s.

Wednesday, 21 August 2013

What we insist on calling “immigration” from the Third World to Western European countries like Britain is a historically new phenomenon, for which a case can be made that other, more appropriate terms should be used — like “colonization” and “invasion.”

The definition of “colony,” from which the word “colonization” is derived, is: a) a body of people living in a new territory but maintaining ties with their homeland or b) a number of people coming from the same country, sharing the same ethnic origin or speaking the same language, who reside in a foreign country or city, or a particular section of it.

Either could apply to the people coming to live in Europe from Asia and Africa.

In reference to colonization, dictionaries add “relating to the developing world,” but this is only because colonization primarily occurred there in the past. Word meanings have to change to adapt to the new historic realities.

Similarly, the expressions “native” and “indigenous” previously referred to the original inhabitants of non-European continents, whereas now they are used to describe Germans, French, British, Swedes, Dutch and so on.

“Invasion” has three main meanings: a) the act of invading, especially the entrance of an armed force into a territory to conquer; b) a large-scale onset of something injurious or harmful, such as a disease; c) an intrusion or encroachment, an incursion by a large number of people or things into a place or sphere of activity.

The latter is a perfectly apt description of what is happening in Western Europe.

Even “ethnic cleansing” could be used, since local populations are being replaced by different ethnic groups. London, for instance, is no longer a white-British-majority city, although mainstream media like the BBC and London’s own paper, the Evening Standard, barely mention it, to say nothing of the city mayor Boris Johnson.

The official United Nations definition of ethnic cleansing is “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove from a given area persons of another ethnic or religious group.”

[...]

Terry Martin has defined ethnic cleansing as “the forcible removal of an ethnically defined population from a given territory” and as “occupying the central part of a continuum between genocide on one end and nonviolent pressured ethnic emigration on the other end.”

European native populations are being replaced because many locals, tired of being colonized, flee their countries, cities or neighborhoods.

The proportion of white British Londoners fell drastically from 60 percent in 2001 to 44.9 per cent in 2011, partly due to the arrival of so many foreign nationals and partly to a mass exodus of white Britons. David Goodhart, director of Demos, writes in The Financial Times:

Over the decade between the 2001 and 2011 censuses, the number of white British Londoners fell by more than 600,000 (17 per cent). That is about three times the fall over the previous census period, 1991 to 2001.

“Most of the leading academic geographers did not expect London to become a majority minority city for another 20 or 30 years – they underestimated the extent to which white British people have opted to leave an increasingly diverse London,” says Eric Kaufmann, an academic at Birkbeck College who is leading a project on “white flight” at Demos, the think-tank I lead.

Six hundred thousand is a big city disappearing in just 10 years.

Are we sure that Londoners have abandoned their city because of this “cultural enrichment”? Looking at the areas where white flight mostly occurs provides reasonable evidence that they do: the most multi-racial districts tend to experience high levels of it.

What the large-scale influx of foreigners to Europe can no longer be called is “immigration.” Immigration is what you have when, for example, small groups of French go to live in Britain or the British in Spain.

What distinguishes invasion from immigration are three things: the volume of people involved in the movement, the span of time and frequency of these movements — the same number of people moving to live in a country over 4 years as opposed to 400 years — and the kind of people, in particular how similar or alien to the natives they are, and how easily or improbably they’ll integrate.

The sheer numbers of people who have come to live in the UK in the last few decades have negatively affected the indigenous population’s quality of life in a serious, profound way, even assuming that those people were all law-abiding, upright citizens, which they are not.

A classic example is the current housing shortage. The UK is suffering its worst housing crisis in modern history. Two or more household units cram into one dwelling, and young people, not being able to afford to move out, live with their parents.

It would be trivializing the issue to say that all housing problems are created by immigration, but it’s impossible to deny the obvious fact they are exacerbating it.

There are other factors contributing to the housing crisis, including the very low interest rates, which result in fewer forced sellers, and the welfare system that, by underwriting sometimes exorbitant rent bills for people who’ve never worked, indirectly encourage landlords to charge more, thus driving up both rental and purchase prices for those who do work.

But one of the main causes is the high number of immigrants increasing the demand for dwellings, while the supply remains low, therefore pushing up house buying and renting prices.

Liberal commentators say that there is no evidence for that, but the evidence is in the most self-explanatory statistics: the more people are in the country, the more properties are needed.

Social housing is also in limited supply. Therefore, the immigrant population that takes a share of it deprives the natives. The percentages are roughly the same: 17 percent of British live in council-rented accommodations, 18 percent of foreigners do.

Leftists and charities would want the government to “build more affordable housing” and “enough homes to meet demand” rather than limit immigration, although it’s difficult to see why the government should act like a construction company in preference to a body that protects and defends the country’s borders.

Tuesday, 20 August 2013

The New Fad Taking The Country By Storm: "Overpasses For Obama’s Impeachment"

The group “Overpasses For Obama’s Impeachment” held rallies around the country this weekend calling for Obama’s impeachment. The group lists 12 reasons for Obama’s impeachment on their website and has quite the following on Facebook. It’s the next big thing.

I'm in the process of transferring here the articles I had on another, older blog which I'm closing down. They are still relevant, showing how things haven't changed at all in the Islamic world but maybe - just maybe - have developed a little bit chez nous.

The Guardian article that I quoted from in here might have still made today the same unfounded, false claims that death for apostasy is not part of Islam that it made then. But, while it's becoming more and more obvious every day that the Muslim persecution of Christians throughout the world is the greatest humanitarian disaster of our times, and while we are in the middle of a proper, probably irreversible, ethnic cleansing of Christians in the Middle East and the media, while pretending to ignore it, cannot possibly be totally unaware of it, the justifications given by this Grauniad hack for the horror being commited against the story's poor innocent man by reference to colonialism ("The age of classical colonialism may have passed but where once the blunderbuss came as an adjunct to the bible, today it has been replaced by the rice bowl.") - even accusing missionaries of only pretending to give aid -, or by reference to "well-intentioned desire to protect cherished beliefs", would today be considered beyond the pale even by Leftist standards. I hope.

------------------------------------------------

The news

Sunday, March 19, 2006.
KABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan man who allegedly converted from Islam to Christianity is being prosecuted in a Kabul court and could be sentenced to death, a judge said Sunday.

The hypocrisy of the Muslims

"We are not against any particular religion in the world. But in Afghanistan, this sort of thing is against the law," the judge said. "It is an attack on Islam. ... The prosecutor is asking for the death penalty."

No, they “are not against any particular religion in the world”.
Except that they consider being Christian a crime punishable by death.
That’s not being against a religion, is it?

The response of Western media

I watched a Channel 4 report on this, that made it sound as if Abdul Rahman (this is the name of the Christian man) was mad (it reported that he was mentally ill), and as if the Afghan government wasn’t all that bad.

Or, look at the Guardian Online. “Don't make a martyr” is the headline, and the article by a Faisal Bodi (isn’t it a name that says it all?) says:

Sending Abdul Rahman to the gallows would indict Islam on a charge of which it is wholly innocent.

Nobody likes a turncoat. Whether it's a scab crossing a picket line, or a footballer joining his club's arch rivals, the consequences of defection will usually haunt them for life.

It's a cross that Abdul Rahman, the Afghan convert to Christianity, is currently having to bear.

By the way, the explanation for his madness could be this one, from two comments posted on Jihad Watch by the same person. One is:

As I noted here, the idea that Abdul Rahman is insane is a more or less clever attempt to please both the irresistable force of Afghanistan's allegiance to Sharia and the immoveable object of American presence and pressure.

Officials say the man, Abdul Rahman, will be released from custody soon.

Who will protect him from raging Sharia-minded mobs when he is freed?

And the second comment is:

Sarinwal Zamari may be floating this idea to extricate the Karzai government from the tight place this case has put it in. It is a common view among Muslims that only someone who is insane, corrupt or under immense pressure would convert from Islam to Christianity, so this angle will make sense to those in Afghanistan who want Abdul Rahman's blood. Likewise it will get them out of holding the trial without their having to say or do anything contrary to traditional Muslim apostasy law. This could be the perfect pirouette to allow Karzai to save face with both camps.

There is an incompatibility between Islam and the ideas which are fundamental to Western civilization.

There are logical contradictions between the principles at the basis of Islam and the West. One cannot resolve logical contradictions, they cannot be solved in the way that problems can. You simply cannot square a circle.

It’s got nothing to do with terrorists, or fundamentalists, fanatics, or Islamic radicals of various sorts.

I’m here talking about mainstream Islam and the fact that it is in serious, direct and open contradiction with principles which are at the core of Western civilization and form the very basis on which all our Western world is erected.

I am not talking about issues like the treatment of women. Islam’s treatment of women is only one aspect, one application of the much more general problem of Islam’s incompatibility with Western principles which I am about to discuss.

There are several elements in Islam which conflict with and contradict Western core principles. Here I'm outlining one of them.

All Muslims believe (and they must believe, I mean it’s not open to interpretation or dispute) that the Koran is the actual word of God. They think God himself dictated it word by word to Mohammed.

Christians think that the Bible was written by human beings: that leaves a lot open to different interpretations and variations in opinion, and it leaves a lot of room for mistakes.

But for Muslims, none of this tolerance and flexibility is possible. Every true Muslim must believe in the complete, literal truth of every word of the Koran.

So, basically, every Muslim is a fundamentalist. That old, tiresome, repeated ad nauseam distinction between Islamic fundamentalists and the “benign” majority of mainstream Muslims is much less important than it is constantly portrayed to be.

This fact in itself, that all Muslims believe in the literal truth of the Koran (no word of the book can actually be disputed) “invites trouble”, opens the gate to all the flood of problems that we have continuously witnessed in the history of Islam. It is a veritable Pandora’s box.

The funny thing is that Muslims themselves have used this argument in order to justify their own intransigence and intolerance, for instance when they try to justify the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.

And I want to remind that, when in Muslim communities living in Britain there were episodes of public burnings of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in the streets, it wasn’t a minority of fundamentalists who were doing and justifying the burnings. On the contrary, it was the Muslims’ majority.

Whenever I watch a TV debate or interview involving Muslims, hardly ever I see the interviewer or participant in the debate ask a Muslim person (supposedly a member of the tolerant Muslim majority who has no problems with Western values) what s/he thinks of the fatwa against Rushdie. That question, and especially its answer, obviously would immediately show an unbridgeable gulf between the supposed “tolerant Muslim” and the rest of us, and would expose this construct of the “tolerant Muslim” for what it is: a myth.

To clarify a possible misunderstanding, I am not here talking about personality traits: I don’t mean “tolerant” in the sense of nice, decent, pleasant, likeable person. I’m sure that there will be many Muslim individuals who fit the latter description. But their “tolerance”, or rather lack of it, is nothing to do with their personal characteristics: it’s not a matter of personal choice. They have no choice. If they are Muslim, they must think that the Koran was indeed written by God through Mohammed’s hand, and therefore it necessarily follows that they cannot tolerate a work like The Satanic Verses: to them it will be tantamount to blasphemy, an insult to God himself.

Saturday, 17 August 2013

If we want to protect and preserve British traditional culture and values, we cannot do it without Christianity. Not only has Christianity been part of them since time immemorial but also they couldn't continue their existence without it.

An anecdote. I was in Steyning, in Sussex, in the Downs, not far from the sea. Our car had broken down. It's a beautiful village (or perhaps a small town now) in the South-East of England, the constituency that my party Liberty GB has chosen for the 2014 Euro Elections. Without enrichers in sight - except for one very kind black bloke who offered to help -, it looked like England may have been pre-enrichment. Very well preserved, with lovely Tudor houses, quaint, there was a building covered in Union Jacks and portraits of the Queen, you've got the idea. Every time we asked the locals for directions to the centre of the village, they directed us to the church.

The question about atheism and religion is simple. Individuals can be atheist, societies cannot. Atheists can be upright, moral individuals. But most people who follow the idea of a Godless world end up behaving in unethical ways, like irresponsibly having children out of wedlock they cannot provide for; treating their sexual life as a drug or alcohol (which they may also be addicted to); repeatedly having late-term abortions which more and more resemble infanticides; becoming addicted to consumerism and material things - kindly called "shopaholics" - to fill their empty lives and ending up with debts they cannot repay; neglecting their elderly parents; putting other people's and their own health at risk with promiscuous heterosexual or homosexual sex; and committing crimes. These people may not necessarily call themselves "atheist", but they have abandoned a moral system which for them would in the past have been dependent on the idea of God.

Think of this. If prisons, punishments and the penal system were abolished tomorrow, there are people who would continue to act more or less in the same way as before. But do you really believe that all members of society would?

There are many who, either because of limited intelligence or other factors - emotional, for example - don't live an ethical life without something guiding them from the outside (a condition that the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant called "heteronomy").

You may ask: what about those atheists who are behaving morally?

There is a risk in that too. A risk of erosion. The majority of atheists or agnostics among us have parents who believed in God, or grandparents, and so on. We have been educated in a Christian or Jewish way which has influenced our outlook, even if this can go back a few generations. But over time those values will become more and more diluted in people and therefore in the education they impart to their children. Gradually, maybe slowly, they will weaken or even disappear.

British culture has its roots in Christianity. It is its breeding ground.

Christianity has a solid rational basis. It has been studied and systematised by philosophers, first in the Middle Ages with the Patristic and Scholastic movements. It has incorporated Aristotelian logic. People like Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens who tell you otherwise are zoologists or journalists, not philosophers of religion, not even philosophers of science. They have no in-depth knowledge or understanding of this subject. If we lose Christianity, we end up believing in all sorts of superstitions, as it's already happening with the increase in the number of people who believe in astrology, spiritualism, all sorts of cults, New Age doctrines, "alternative" medicine, and so on.

And also, let's not forget that reason has its limits. It is rational to understand that reason is not everything.

No society has ever been without religion. If we lose Christianity, we will fall prey to other, much worse, religions or pseudo-religions, like, um, let me think, Islam for instance.

Thursday, 15 August 2013

I've just found something I had written in February 2005, at a time when questioning government's immigration policies in the UK was no longer considered downright racist like in, say, the 1990s, but not yet mainstream political discourse at it has become now. I publish it here because it shows the road we've travelled.

---------------------------------------

In January 2005, the UK television channel ITV showed a program, called Vote For Me!, described as a political reality show, in which some so-called members of the general public, all with passionate political views, contested to get a public phone vote. The winner of Vote For Me! moved forward to the opportunity of standing for parliament.

There was also a panel of 3 judges and a studio audience, but they didn't actually affect the vote in the end.

At the time the ITV website said: “But that was what Vote For Me! was about: giving real people with real issues a voice. But more than that, Vote For Me! gave you, the people, the chance to choose a representative. A person who could honestly claim to be: 'The People's Choice'.”

That was the blurb: the reality was quite different, in that the program tried in every way to influence the result, and in the end it was rumoured that ITV was not happy at all with it, to the point of regretting having made the show.

“All three judges urged viewers to vote me off. The show started as being light-hearted. But as it progressed it changed. In fact, it changed following my mention of a policy of nil immigration. At that point, it turned into a different animal.”

In fact, after having watched that, in the face of escalating insults from the panel "judges" and continuous booing and jeering from the TV studio audience, Rodney Hylton-Potts obtained such an astounding victory from the public at home, which almost looked like an opinion poll result, I decided to look for myself at what the British public actually thought of current immigration policies.

Four out of 10 white people do not want an Asian or black Briton as their neighbour, according to a survey published this week. The opinion poll found rocketing concern about immigration and asylum.

The Mori survey for Prospect magazine found that 39% of those asked would prefer to live in an area only with people from the same ethnic background. Forty-one per cent of whites and 26% of ethnic minority people surveyed wanted the races to live separately. Over half of all ethnic groups wanted to live in diverse areas.

Bobby Duffy, research director at Mori, said: "We have overestimated the progress we have made in race and immigration issues. I'm surprised about such a high finding as people are usually reticent because they worry about being judged by the interviewer, so this finding is worrying."

The poll shows that the issue of race and immigration has risen up the list of people's concerns, and is now the third most important, ahead of crime, defence and the economy. The issue is ranked the most important by 29%, behind education on 33% and the NHS on 41%. Ten years ago the figure was below 10%.

If the Mori research director mentioned in the article is worried about those results, what about the next?

Of the people polled, 74% agree with the statement "Too many immigrants are coming to Britain."

Asked about the problems caused by immigration - and remember, this is important, that it was a one-answer question, so people could only choose one among some possible answers - 53% think that immigrants are putting too much pressure on public services, and as many as 25% (one quarter) think that immigration is upsetting the racial balance in the country.

To the question "Do you think people in your neighbourhood would approve or disapprove if more people from each of the following groups moved to your area?", the majority of people answered "Disapprove" when the group in question was Black Africans (43%), Iraqis (64%), Pakistanis (56%), West Indians (41%). The majority answered "Not mind" when the group in question was Australians (63%) and Polish (50%).

Some people might rush to say: racist.

But this is a too hasty and harsh judgement of public opinion.

Look at this interesting result: the only other group was Romanians and, although last time I checked these are white, the majority said: "Disapprove" (48%).

So, something else is at work here.

Could it be that common people have a better instinct than politicians, the media, and the intellectual elite?

A new opinion poll which sampled opinion across ten countries found the majority of people in Britain are supportive of religious tolerance - but still believe that immigration has damaged the country.

The research triggered a mixture of disbelief and concern from mainstream political parties yesterday, amid fears that asylum is becoming a growing issue ahead of the 10 June European Parliament elections.

Ipsos, a Paris-based polling firm, found 60 per cent believing that immigrants were a bad influence on Britain - the highest proportion of all countries surveyed.

France, where the far-right National Front came second in the presidential election two years ago, emerged as one of the more moderate countries in the study with only 53 per cent arguing that migrants made the country worse.

But seven out of ten in France said that religious diversity within a country is to be welcomed, and three-quarters said that immigrants arrive to take the jobs which native Frenchmen refuse to do.

The same split reaction - welcoming religious pluralism but fearing that immigration has been harmful overall - also characterised Spain, Germany and Italy.

Ipsos, which conducted the poll with the Associated Press, admitted that its findings contradict widespread feeling that Britain - with its long history of migration and colonisation - is more relaxed about multiculturalism.

For that last statement, read: we thought that we had done a much better job at brainwashing the British public than we actually, demonstrably have.

And, finally, consider this: pollsters, namely the professionals in the field, think that polls, particularly online polls, are likely to produce more liberal responses than in the electorate as a whole.

The party Liberty GB is very new, as it was formed in March of this year. The Executive Council comprises Chairman Paul Weston, Party Nominating Officer George Whale, Culture Officer Jack Buckby, Policy Officer Stephen Evans, Associate Matthew Roberts, IT Officer and Treasurer, and me as Press Officer.

Liberty GB is a patriotic, counter-jihad party for Christian and Western civilisation, freedoms, animal welfare, capitalism, progress in ideas and society.

It arose from the need to fill a vacuum that existed in British politics between the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and parties like the British National Party (BNP) with a reputation of anti-Semitism and racism.

The country's three main parties - Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats - are clearly creating, rather than solving, the problems facing Britain, but they are not the only ones to appease Islam and compromise about immigration, having recently been joined in those endeavours by UKIP, despite its initial promise of real conservatism.

Powell was prescient in warning his countrymen about the serious dangers of mass immigration from the Third World, which had then only started and had not yet reached the astronomical levels of later decades. He said:

We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre...

For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood."

His predictions were correct in every respect: the indigeonous population has indeed been overwhelmed by huge numbers of immigrants and subjugated by the politically correct race-relations industry. The last sentence, which gave the speech its name, is a reference to the Latin poet Virgil’s epic poem Aeneid.

But, rather than applauding Powell and blaming his opponents, in the interview Farage blamed the parliamentarian for the opposition his speech encountered, siding with the Left who strumentalised the metaphorical, indeed poetic, part of the speech - the one containing the word "blood" - to make the whole thing appear like the utterances of a violent fanatic who wanted, rather than predicted, blood:

He [Farage] said: "The Powell speech was a disaster. Everybody ran scared of discussing this for decades. Now, I think what Ukip has done is to help make immigration a sensible, moderate, realistic, mainstream debate."

UKIP's previous policy to put an end to the age of "mass uncontrolled immigration" through a 5-year-freeze on immigration and a cap of 50,000 people per annum on future immigration, which is the party's main selling point, is under review, with a possible increase in the cap.

The disappointment with the UKIP felt by many supporters could explain its sharp decline in opinion polls, already evident in June and now even more pronounced. It was supported by 18% of respondents in May, 12% in June and now just 7%.

Islam, one of the major problems facing Britain and Europe today, indeed in many ways the most important problem, since it is a question of our own survival, receives so little attention from UKIP that a search for the term "Islam" on its website produces only 6 results. In some of them Islam is mentioned in the context of foreign policy, like the possible British intervention in the Syrian war or how to interact with "moderate Muslim states". In 5 cases out of those 6, the word "Islam" is accompanied by the qualifying adjective "extreme", "extremist" or "fundamentalist", and in the 6th is part of the phrase "puritanical and intolerant strain of Wahhabi Islam".

No results for "halal" on the UKIP's site.

On ritual slaughter this was the policy in the 2010 General Election Party Manifesto:

UKIP believes that the UK should examine the pros and cons of proposals to insist on pre-stunning through a Royal Commission. The Commission should study examples from Denmark, New Zealand and others and evaluate whether the religious exemptions which cause suffering to animals should be repealed or not, or whether a requirement for pre-stunning be introduced.

We think that the distinction between Islam and "extreme" Islam is spurious, because Islam, wanting world domination and global imposition of its law with any means, is intrinsically extreme. It is also fundamentalist because it preaches that the Quran was written by Allah and dictated to Muhammad through the Archangel Gabriel, so, being directly the word of God and not - like the Bible - written by men, must necessarily be taken literally.

We know that Islam is not a religion but a political ideology worse than fascism and communism, and that it is wrongly and unjustly protected by freedom of religion.

Indeed the Liberty GB website has devoted many articles to exposing Islam, including essays which criticise historical revisionism of the Crusades and the imaginary contributions of Islam to science and mathematics that inhabit Obama's mind.

Of all these, none is more dangerous and insidious than halal meat, which is why Liberty GB has made it the target of a particular campaign. Halal is Islam's Trojan horse to penetrate and conquer our lands. It is the first giant step of our Islamisation.

In a similar way in which magazines, for example, introduce to the reader and explore a wide topic by focusing on particular individuals affected by it, it is easier for people to concentrate their attention and energy on a specific issue like halal, through which all of Islam in the West can be targeted, rather than tackling the whole subject of Islam. Besides, halal is arguably the most detested aspect of our Islamisation.

We stand for Christianity as an ethical as well as a theological system, therefore accepting that there can be, as the great Oriana Fallaci declared herself, “atheist Christians” or “agnostic Christians”.

We exist not just to attract people, but also to change them in order to change the status quo. We won’t change anything if we don’t change what people think. This is the cultural battle that the Left has fought and won until now, and that we know we must fight in order to win.

We don’t want to do what UKIP has recently been doing. We don’t blindly follow public opinion, we change it, and this is our unique selling proposition.

Decades of socio-communist propaganda have resulted in many people having very confused ideas about Christianity, about which they only know or believe they know bad things.

Jesus Christ declared all men to be equal. Both the doctrine and the history of Christianity vouch for its solid egalitarian, anti-discriminatory stance. When we say that we are Christian, ethically even if not necessarily theologically, we are implicitly saying that we are anti-racist without even having to say it explicitly. It was Christians who abolished slavery first in the Roman Empire and then in the 19th-century United States. No other religious group has ever done that. It has been Christians, today as in the past, who have gone to all the most inhospitable corners of the globe to help the poor of all races for nothing in return.

A smart party primes voters for the realization that it was right all along. A stupid party “evolves” and tosses aside its positions and becomes discredited and indistinguishable from the ruling party.

Friday, 9 August 2013

The unfortunate article published on The Telegraph"Islam is way more English than the EDL" is a classical example of the most myopic and ignorant journalism. The author, Tim Stanley, has no idea of what Islam is, and yet insists in writing about Islam.

Just read this:

By contrast, most Muslims cling on to values that were once definitively English and that we could do with rediscovering. Islam instructs its followers to cherish their families, to venerate women [by beating and stoning them], to treat strangers kindly [by beheading them], to obey the law of any country they are in (yes, yes, it really does) [by imposing sharia law everywhere by hook or by crook], and to give generously. One recent poll found that British Muslims donate more money to charity than any other religious group.

Pity he doesn't know that the Quran prescribes to believers only charity for other Muslims, not infidels.

He is also unacquainted with the fact that one eighth of Muslim charity - zakat - must go, according to Islamic law, to jihadists fighting in Allah's cause: terrorists, killers of Christians in the Middle East, Hamas, al-Qaeda-linked groups and other such nice company.

Zakat can be given in the path of Allah. By this is meant to finance a Jihad effort in the path of Allah, not for Jihad for other reasons. The fighter (mujahid) will be given as salary what will be enough for him. If he needs to buy arms or some other supplies related to the war effort, Zakat money should be used provided the effort is to raise the banner of Islam.

Which explains why one of the world’s largest and most influential Islamic charities, the Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW), much loved by clueless Prince Charles and given tens of millions of dollars by the European Union, the United Nations and Western governments, is, according to an extensive amount of evidence gathered and recently published by the Gatestone Institute, “an extremist organization with a pro-terror agenda":

IRW’s accounts show that it has partnered with a number of organizations linked to terrorism and that some of charity’s trustees are personally affiliated with extreme Islamist groups that have connections to terror.

These include Hamas, al-Qaeda, terrorists in Chechnya, and other terror and Muslim Brotherhood groups in various parts of the world.

But Tim is adamant that Islam represents traditional English values worth rediscovering. What he writes next makes you think of a borderline case of a person living in a parallel universe:

Much is written about the need for Muslims to integrate better into English society, although I'm sure 99 per cent of them already do [they integrate even better into English prisons]. But I hope they retain as much of their religious identity as possible – it is vastly superior to the materialist, secular mess that they're being compelled to become a part of. [I'm really curious to know who compels them: it must be the invisible man, because I've never seen such a person or persons.]

...But its [sic] precisely because I'm a traditionalist that I look at Islam and see much to admire – ordered, sensitive to the sacred, civilised.

I suppose that it's because Islam is so civilised that Muslim countries are among the poorest, most violent, most illiterate, inhumane, politically unstable and backward countries in the world, and the people living there can't wait to leave those places to come and inhabit our materialist mess.

Thursday, 8 August 2013

“Beware! Halal food funds terrorists.” Stickers with this slogan were sold in July by a candidate of the Australian political party One Nation, and condemned by the country’s Multicultural Affairs Minister Glen Elmes as “offensive, grotesque and designed to inflame hatred.” He added: “People are encouraged to put the stickers on food products in supermarkets, which isn’t just racial discrimination, it’s also vandalism.”

What the sticker says, though, is apparently taking place in the USA and Canada where Campbell’s Soup and other companies have paid the Hamas-linked Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) for their halal certification, in France, where it is claimed that 60% of halal food is controlled by organizations belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood and the so-called “halal tax” is the organization’s main source of funding. In the UK, major supermarket chain Morrisons is not only indirectly but even directly giving money to the Islamic National Zakat Foundation. I’ll explain what that is about in a minute.

“Ritual slaughter” is the slaughter of animals for food following religious prescriptions. The Muslim method to produce halal (“lawful” or “permissible”) meat consists of cutting fully conscious animals’ throat while the name of Allah is uttered and letting them bleed to death. The Jewish method of producing kosher meat shares with the Muslim one the fact that the animal is not stunned before being killed.

Laws of Western countries generally require that animals are stunned to render them unconscious before slaughter, but allow exceptions for both Jewish and Muslim ritual slaughter.
Government advisory bodies, like the Farm Animal Welfare Council and the British Veterinary Association in the UK, have produced reports and made declarations saying that ritual slaughter causes ”intolerable cruelty” and have repeatedly demanded that it be banned.

The Muslim Council of Britain claims that most halal meat comes from stunned animals, but in reality a very low voltage is used in their electrocution, resulting in inadequate stunning.

This makes it objectionable to most non-Muslims on animal welfare grounds. Christians and others – Sikhs in Britain currently have an anti-halal petition – also consider the utterance of Allah’s name at the moment of slaughter as idolatry.

And a major concern is that halal meat is just no longer for Muslim consumption, but is sold to “infidels” in ever greater quantity the world over.

To get an idea of the extent of this phenomenon, one of the most influential halal certification bodies, the Halal Food Authority, now estimates that a staggering 25% of the entire UK meat market is halal. But Muslims are about 5% of the UK population, therefore there is as much as 5 times more halal meat than Muslims.

In Britain halal meat is routinely served and sold to non-Muslims who don’t even know that they’re eating it, let alone want to do so. Schools, hospitals, hundreds of restaurants and pubs, sporting venues like Wembley football stadium and Ascot race course, all the main supermarkets chains – none excluded – fast-food and pizza chains have been drawn into what commercially must look like a win-win situation for them: Muslims complain and demand halal, non-Muslims don’t complain, adapt and tolerate. Especially if they’re not informed and food is not properly labelled.

In dhimmi Britain, when pork or other non-halal food is accidentally discovered in school menus, as recently happened, it causes a fervor, hits headlines, the food is immediately removed and the responsible sacked, but it’s nearly impossible to have halal meat – which non-Muslims don’t want – removed from schools or at least not served to unbelievers. In an increasing number of schools halal is the only meat served. Is the only way to ban halal food in schools to “contaminate” it with pork, as someone suggested?

What’s happening with halal is that we are experiencing for the first time in the West Islamization on a large scale. Great numbers of people are forced to live according to Sharia law whether they like it or not, which is the essence of Islam and its supremacist nature.

Christian Concern reported the words of the Operation Nehemiah Halal Campaign, run by the Barnabas Fund:

There is an open campaign by Islamic food agencies to integrate halal into the mainstream market and to extend it to non-Muslims. The World Halal Forum held its annual conference in London earlier this month (November), and has identified the UK as a pilot project for halal in Europe…

The spread of halal is often part of the commitment to Islamic mission (dawa) and the Islamisation of non-Muslim societies. The imposition of sharia practices on non-Muslims may be interpreted as an act of Islamic supremacy.”

That it is a question of supremacy and economic profit and not religious compliance is shown by the fact that Islam specifically exempts its faithful from the obligation to eat halal food if none is available:

He hath only forbidden you dead meat, and blood, and the flesh of swine, and that on which any other name hath been invoked besides that of Allah. But if one is forced by necessity, without wilful disobedience, nor transgressing due limits,- then is he guiltless. For Allah is Oft-forgiving Most Merciful. Quran (002:173)

Every time you drive around London you are subjected to the sight of myriad halal signs, a constant reminder of the transformation of Britain into an Islamic country. You can even measure this process of Islamization by the number of halal signs that you see multiply in the same streets and areas.

If women in the hijab and burka are the visible representation of Muslim presence in the West, halal signs are the visible symbol of Muslim supremacism taking hold of it – at least women who veil themselves don’t impose their dress code on others.

We are witnessing a Muslim takeover of an increasing share of the food industry and other industries, with consequences on the job market of Britain, a nation with a high level of unemployment, especially among the young. Halal products include not just meat, but also a long list of goods containing slaughterhouse by-products like gelatin and collagen, which are ingredients in many various foodstuffs – from Easter eggs to cat food – cosmetics, toiletries, pharmaceuticals, and other products.

It is a multi-billion dollars industry, and growing.

All halal products require certification by a Muslim agency, which the agency is paid for.
The principle of “zakat” in Islamic law makes it obligatory for all Muslims to give 2.5% of their income to charity – only in aid of their coreligionists, of course. Zakat has to be distributed among 8 categories of recipients, one of which is the jihadists fighting in Allah’s cause. From Mission Islam:

Zakat can be given in the path of Allah. By this is meant to finance a Jihad effort in the path of Allah, not for Jihad for other reasons. The fighter (mujahid) will be given as salary what will be enough for him. If he needs to buy arms or some other supplies related to the war effort, Zakat money should be used provided the effort is to raise the banner of Islam.

According to Islamic law, it would not be permissible, or “halal,” for Islamic organizations providing halal certification not to pay zakat, which under Islamic law is obligatory for all Muslims, on the fees they charge.

Therefore, whenever you buy one of the many halal-certified products increasingly found in our Western countries, even without your knowledge and against your will, you are indirectly contributing to Islamic terrorists, killers of Christians in the Middle East, al-Qaeda-linked groups and so on. Buy halal and you fund jihad against Israel.

Many Islamic “charities” have known links to terrorism and Islamic extremism. In early July the Gatestone Institute published a report documenting the many links discovered between the Islamic Relief Worldwide charity, with headquarters in the UK, and terror groupswith an anti-Western agenda. Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW) consists of a “family of fifteen aid agencies” which “aim to alleviate the suffering of the world’s poorest people.” What looks like an innocuous — indeed philanthropic — charity is, according to this report, “an extremist organization with a pro-terror agenda… [which] has worked with a significant number of organizations linked to terrorism.” Western governments, the United Nations and the European Union should be more careful about whom they donate their money to, since they all gave tens of millions of dollars to IRW, whose most important branches include Islamic Relief UK and Islamic Relief USA. The report says:

IRW’s accounts show that it has partnered with a number of organizations linked to terrorism and that some of charity’s trustees are personally affiliated with extreme Islamist groups that have connections to terror.

Those organizations and groups, over the years, have included Hamas and Hamas-related bodies like Al Wafa and Al Tzalah; terrorists in Chechnya; al-Qaeda; the Yemeni Al-Eslah organization, a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood; terrorist and Muslim Brotherhood groups operating in various European countries; and many more.

What makes IRW, which is one of the world’s largest and most influential Islamic charities, more dangerous is that it has acquired legitimacy among Western politicians and public figures. Even heir to the British throne Prince Charles has expressed support and appeared at IRW events. But there has been very little scrutiny of IRW and its branches.

In sum, although halal is on its surface an animal cruelty concern, it is also a crucial area of conflict between the West and those who want to force Islam, literally, down our throats. It also empowers Muslims culturally, ideologically, politically and, last but not least, economically, in a terrifying way.

Wednesday, 7 August 2013

I remember that Paola Cavalieri, the editor of the Italian journal Etica e Animali, once said to me: "If human beings have privileges at the expense of nonhuman animal suffering, it would be best if none of them existed: at least we would all be equal".

There is a deep truth in that: egalitarianism, taken to its extreme consequences, would lead to total destruction of all sentient life. Being dead is the only state in which we are all equal. Life is diversity itself.

I was reminded of that when I heard on the radio a discussion about zero-hours contracts, under which an employee must be available for work as needed, will only be paid for the hours worked, and has no guaranteed hours each month.

The recent concerns expressed arise from the emerging of new figures indicating that there could be as many as four times more people than previously thought in zero-hours jobs. The research suggests a million people could be working under them.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development surveyed 1,000 firms and found that up to 4% of the UK workforce were on such contracts.

Zero-hours contracts are on the rise, and is predicted that they will continue to increase, because employers more and more try to find cost-effective ways to meet short-term staffing needs.

Fast-food, catering, hotel, shop-assistant jobs are the most common occupations under these contracts, and also some NHS jobs.

Business Secretary Vince Cable is now concerned that, he said, there is "some exploitation" of staff on these contracts, and he started a review into the state of zero-hours contracts.

A ban on this hiring method is unlikely because many workers actually prefer it, like flexible hours and want to work only occasionally, around existing commitments, but we may see the usual government meddling, restrictions and regulations.

But why on earth should anyone want to force businesses to employ on a regular contract people they don't need or more people they can afford?

This can only lead to potential employers being increasingly wary of hiring, and to a rise in unemployment.

Don't they see that overregulating and interfering is a recipe for more destructive economic outcomes? The labour market must be subject to the same economic (not political) laws of the market as everything else. This is the only way that a modern society can be productive: call it capitalism if you like. The alternative, socialism, makes everybody poor.

But maybe that's what egalitarians really want. As Paola Cavalieri, they prefer everybody to have nothing, which is the only sure way to erase all income disparities.

Monday, 5 August 2013

Science is the systematic application of a logico-empiricist method to look at and understand things, and was born in Christian Europe first with the Scholastic philosophy and then with Leonardo da Vinci, Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei.

The necessary foundation for scientific research is the belief in one God that created a universe regulated by immutable laws which can be understood by man exactly because God's mind and man's are similar except in extent. The Christian God is a person.

Galileo famously talked about the "book of nature", that scientists try to read, being written by God. This is possible because both God and man have a similar mind. If you read a book, you think you can understand the author because you speak the same language and your mind works in an analoguous way. Galileo also said that the book of nature is written in mathematical language.

The ancient people who went closest to developing science were the Greeks. But they were hindered by their polytheism and, after the 4th century BC, by the dominance of the Aristotelian method.

The latter consists in deducing phenomena from fixed principles. The many, capricious deities of the Olympus were also an obstacle to the rise of scientific thought, not being believed capable of creating a rational universe.

As historian of science Bernard Cohen (1914-2003) wrote, ancient Greeks were interested in explaining the natural world only through abstract general principles. The first technical innovations, dating back to prehistoric ages, Greco-Roman times, the Islamic world and China, were not science but are best described as observations, knowledge, learning, wisdom, arts, trades, crafts, technology, engineering. Even without telescopes, the ancient excelled in astronomic observations but without connecting them to testable theories.

It is no coincidence that many of the disciplines which are now part of science were once part of philosophy.

Science is made of theories which are subject to independent confirmation or falsification. The intellectual achievements of Greek or Oriental philosophers were either fruit of atheoretical empiricism or non-empirical theories.

Historian of science Harold Dorn considers the Greeks' atheoretical knowledge a barrier to the birth of science in Greece and Rome and also in the Islamic world, which preserved and studied Greek teachings.

This in no way diminishes the immense value of Greek culture and its great impact on Christian theology and European intellectual life. However, as historian of religions Rodney Stark observed, the birth of science was not the continuation of classical knowledge but the natural consequence of Christian doctrine: nature exists because it was created by God and, to love Him and honour Him, it is necessary to have a profound appreciation of the wonders of His actions.

The Chinese, when they came into contact with Western culture, found the idea of laws of nature and an order in the universe absurd. We now take it for granted, but it is by no means an easy notion to arrive at.

Bertrand Russell found the absence of science in China puzzling, but in fact it is understandable, since the Chinese scholars did not assume the existence of rational laws. Therefore, over millennia, what was sought was "enlightenment", not explanations.

British biochemist and science historian Joseph Needham (1900-1995), who devoted most of his career to the history of Chinese technology, reports that in the 18th century the Chinese rejected the idea of a universe governed by simple laws capable of being investigated by man - idea brought to them by Western Jesuit missionaries. Chinese culture, according to Needham, was not receptive to such concepts. He concluded that the obstacle to science in China was its non-Christian religion, because that prevented the development of the conception of a heavenly, divine legislator imposing laws on non-human nature. The Chinese believed that the natural order was not established by a rational individual being.

America's career anti-racists, the Left and the mainstream media had convicted Zimmerman long before the trial, because for them it is axiomatic that a black must necessarily be innocent, so, despite all the evidence in support of the neighbourhood-watch volunteer Zimmerman (who is of mixed white-Hispanic parentage) and his plea of self-defence, in their prejudiced eyes he must have been guilty of murder.

But people with a bias don't have scruples about playing dirty. Defence attorney O'Mara pointed out the struggle he went through to get evidence from the prosecution team:

He cited the picture of a bloodied Zimmerman, taken the night Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, as an example.

"It is undeniable that they had a plan in mind, with the 15 months that we had to get ready, of keeping information from us, and I don't say that lightly, I really don't," O'Mara told the group.

A member of prosecutor Angela Corey's own team testified that prosecutors had kept evidence from O'Mara, for which he was fired and is now suing her office.

"You have this type of gamesmanship for the sole purpose of trying to deny a fair trial and, as it turned out, try to convict an innocent man," said O'Mara.

O'Mara has filed a motion that will be heard by Judge Debra Nelson.

He claims prosecutors purposely withheld evidence from him and the defense team.

Channel 9 has learned that O'Mara could go after Corey. She called Zimmerman a murderer on national television after the trial.

"He could bring civil action against Angela Corey for statement she made outside the courtroom. Also, he could file a grievance against her with the Florida Bar," WFTV legal analyst Bill Sheaffer said.

Sheaffer asked O'Mara whether he intends to drop the issue.

"I am not done with that motion. I'm not done with Angela Corey. And we are going to be seeing more of each other. We'll see how that turns out," said O'Mara. "This is because this is not supposed to be how we practice as lawyers."

Channel 9 contacted Corey's office for a response, but the call was not returned.

Friday, 2 August 2013

Continuing on the theme of what Muslims did - or more likely did not do - for the world, there is a widespread misconception that they "invented algebra". Maybe this fallacy is due to the fact that "algebra" is a word of Arabic origin, but historical questions are not solved by etymological answers.

Yes, the English word "algebra" derives from the Arabic. So does "sugar" (from the Arabic "sukkar") but that doesn't mean that Muslims invented sugar.

The word "algebra" stems from the Arabic word "al-jabr", from the name of the treatise Book on Addition and Subtraction after the Method of the Indians written by the 9th-century Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, who translated, formalized and commented on ancient Indian and Greek works.

It is even doubtful whether al-Khwārizmī was really a Muslim. The Wikipedia entry on him says:

Regarding al-Khwārizmī's religion, Toomer writes:

"Another epithet given to him by al-Ṭabarī, "al-Majūsī," would seem to indicate that he was an adherent of the old Zoroastrian religion. This would still have been possible at that time for a man of Iranian origin, but the pious preface to al-Khwārizmī's Algebra shows that he was an orthodox Muslim, so al-Ṭabarī's epithet could mean no more than that his forebears, and perhaps he in his youth, had been Zoroastrians."

In all likelihood he was a Zoroastrian who was forced to convert (or die) by Muslim rulers because Persia had been conquered by the Islamic armies and that was what Muslims did (and still do wherever they can). That could easily explain the "pious preface to al-Khwārizmī's Algebra".

Wikipedia also says:

In Renaissance Europe, he [al-Khwārizmī] was considered the original inventor of algebra, although it is now known that his work is based on older Indian or Greek sources.

There is archaeological evidence that the roots of algebra date back to the ancient Babylonians, then developed in Egypt and Greece. The Chinese and even more the Indians also advanced algebra and wrote important works on the subject.

The Alexandrian Greek mathematician Diophantus (3rd century AD), sometimes called "the father of algebra", wrote a series of books, called Arithmetica, dealing with solving algebraic equations. Another Hellenistic mathematician who contributed to the progress of algebra was Hero of Alexandria, as did the Indian Brahmagupta in his book Brahmasphutasiddhanta.

With the Italian Leonardo Pisano (known as Leonardo Fibonacci, as he was the son of Bonacci) in the 13th century, another Italian mathematician, Girolamo Cardano, author in 1545 of the 40-chapter masterpiece Ars magna ("The great art"), and the late-16th-century French mathematician François Viète, we move from the prehistory of algebra to the beginning of the classical discipline of algebra.

Arabic philosophy is not important as original thought. Men like Avicenna and Averroes are essentially commentators. Speaking generally, the views of the more scientific philosophers come from Aristotle and the Neoplatonists in logic and metaphysics, from Galen in medicine, from Greek and Indian sources in mathematics and astronomy, and among mystics religious philosophy has also an admixture of old Persian beliefs. Writers in Arabic showed some originality in mathematics and in chemistry--in the latter case, as an incidental result of alchemical researches.

Mohammedan civilization in its great days was admirable in the arts and in many technical ways, but it showed no capacity for independent speculation in theoretical matters. Its importance, which must not be underrated, is as a transmitter. Between ancient and modern European civilization, the dark ages intervened. The Mohammedans and the Byzantines, while lacking the intellectual energy required for innovation, preserved the apparatus of civilization--education, books, and learned leisure. Both stimulated the West when it emerged from barbarism--the Mohammedans chiefly in the thirteenth century, the Byzantines chiefly in the fifteenth. In each case the stimulusproduced new thought better than any produced by the transmitters--in the one case scholasticism, in the other the Renaissance (which however had other causes also).

You can see that to say that Muslims invented or pioneered algebra is a gross misrepresentation.

In conclusion, there are various attempts at historical revisionism as far as Islamic contributions to the world are concerned. These attempts are more political propaganda than academic scholarship. After all, taqiyya, lying to the infidels to advance Allah's cause, is permitted, and even prescribed, to Muslims, and jihad does not just consist in violent aggression or terror attacks: it can be gradual, by stealth, through indoctrination and false reassurance.

Thursday, 1 August 2013

Above is the video of a BBC lynch mob against Tommy Robinson of the English Defence League, during the programme called - a misnomer - FreeSpeech on BBC3. It is not free speech if you verbally abuse and even incite to murder someone for exercising his right to free speech, as it happens in this "debate".

Interestingly, the comments to the video on YouTube reveal how the audience was cherry-picked by the BBC to fit its political bent and in no way represents the British general public. That's reassuring, because a country whose population the studio crowd faithfully represented would be a cross between the Soviet Union and Pakistan.

Horrendous ganging up against one person by clueless people - or worse - is a more apt description of the situation. A bloke in the video, apparently a "musician" I'd never heard of called Akala, who talks about Islamic culture pioneering mathematics and science, must have been listening to Obama instead of going to school. Has he ever heard of Euclid, the father of geometry, and Pythagoras? Muslims did not pioneer anything. All they did was translate intellectual treasures from the original Greek into Arabic. The numbers we use and call "Arabic" were actually developed in India and translated from Sanskrit into Arabic, hence their name.

Islamophile Barack Hussein Obama has been big on the subject of "Islam Has Contributed To The Character Of Our Country" in his celebration of Ramadan, recently but not for the first time. He also mentions "Muslims who helped unlock the secrets of our universe", whose names he must have been hard pressed to find because he didn't say them.

In reality, science and Islam are fundamentally incompatible, which is why, despite the propaganda, there are no Muslim scientists in the history of the Islamic world. The only rational thinkers of some influence that world has produced, Averroes and Avicenna, were not real Muslims, but apostates. Avicenna (980-1037) was an Aristotelian who tried to reconcile formal logic with Islam and failed. Averroes (1126-1198), also influenced by Aristotle, had his works burnt and his disciples persecuted.

The very notion of God in Islam, a being whose power is so absolute that cannot be limited by reason, logic or the laws of nature, and who can at any moment change the order of the universe at his will - if Allah arbitrarily so commands, tomorrow the sun will not rise - makes it impossible to have a Muslim science. Science, a systematic method of looking at things combining empiricism and logic, developed only in Christianity.

Even putting aside this little faux pas, that mercifully for Akala - who is a writer, artist and entrepreneur, no less - nobody disputed (another indication, if necessary, of the lacklustre intellectual standard of this audience), it was evident that Robinson's opponents, namely the whole studio, couldn't stand up to him.

Siara Khan never defined "racism" and how opposition to Islam could be racist. Muslims can be of all races.

The tone of the debate and the level of the participants are demonstrated to be low by the fact that, while all the "debate" - which mainly consists in hurling abuse of "racist" at Tommy Robinson - revolves around racism, you have right from the start something contradicting that premise: a white Muslim. Racism is unjust discrimination on the basis of race. If you "discriminate" against all races, whites included, you discriminate against no race, ergo you are not racist.

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About Me

Philosophy graduate, journalist, website creator and
blogger born in Italy and living in London. I have been London correspondent for Italian media, including Panorama, L'Espresso, La
Repubblica. I translated Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation into Italian.